Pathfinder: Kingmaker (2018)

What can I say, I love this game. This game has two games: A management system and the CRPG one.

Pathfinder Kingmaker as a CRPG is one of numbers. Defeat the AC and saves or have enough AC and saves and you're good to go. Though roleplays may be preferred by majority of players and should play at lower difficulties, the real meat of the game is having sufficient knowledge of how to ramp up your characters numbers in such a way that characters have 75+ AC or 20+ saves. Survival in high difficulties require this meta knowledge.

The other aspect of the game is kingdom management. This one requires further mastery because artisans (who make OP items for the MC) is deeply ingrained in this system. Suffice to say that after 3 non-continuous months of gameplay and research, I've mastered the system. The previous sentence in layman's terms means "this portion of game is incredibly frustrating".

Still, this game is my second favorite CRPG.

What a slog this game is. The walk, run and travel speed are so slow. And my characters need to nap 3x a day, using a terrible rest system.

None of the characters are really standing out, it's nothing pretty to look at and the combat is punishing and tedious.

It looks like this game is 100 hours + which is way too long, even for a good game. I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.

Bought this on a Steam sale ages ago, finally installed and started playing. Haven't gotten to the kingdom stuff yet, but I'm enjoying the exploration so far. Really digging the dialogue trees and associated skills, I'm playing on a lower difficulty to experience the story so I'm not getting bogged down in overly long battles.

Exploration can be a little tedious at times, and I had one instance that felt a little overly punishing (a weird ghost skull man who nobody in my party could hurt that attacked when I tried to take a desperately needed rest). But I'll just chalk that up to standard CRPG nonsense.

I generally love CRPGs, but I don't think I'm going to make it through this one even though I'm 60 hours in. For every good decision Owlcat made, they made one annoying decision, and one outright bad decision.

The time limits are obnoxious. The swarms, ability damage, level drain, etc. spam is obnoxious. The waves of trivial enemies is tedious. The abundance of copy-pasted locations with a single encounter were disappointing. The kingdom management can be rather frustrating, with 'problems' sprouting up that, for some reason, can only be solved by a single adviser... who is already solving a problem that only they could solve. Some of your party members spawn in locations you've already visited after specific events, with no hints to go back. I most likely would have been in a losing position (you can actually completely lose if your kingdom fails) if I hadn't regularly resorted to searching the forums. The loading times are long and you are highly incentivized to save scum since problems tend to compound.

All that said, I was really enjoying the grand scope of the game. I like making and leveling up characters in Pathfinder, even if I have no interest in playing it as a table top game at this point. I was genuinely curious to see where the story would wind up. I'm just burned out on the tedium and constant minor frustrations.